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Sunday, January 3, 2016

Chocolate Covered Cherries

Happy National Chocolate Covered Cherries Day! Chocolate covered anything is usually good but I love the tartness of the cherries and the sweetness of the chocolate. And since today's prompt is "chocolate", it was perfect!

I usually start with a loose pencil sketch of what I want to draw. And I usually ink my drawing with the Platinum Carbon Pen but I decided to go directly to watercolors today. And I decided to use the Holbein palette.

For the chocolate, I used burnt umber and burnt sienna. I also added ultramarine blue for shadow areas.

I love the "black" you get from burnt umber and ultramarine. And since I was using ultramarine for the plate shadows, it made for a more harmonizing palette.

The cherries were done with vermillion and Crimson lake, with a bit of ultramarine added in the shadow areas. For the most part, I remembered to leave white areas for highlights. But I still had to use my Posca paint pen for white in some areas.

I'm very happy with the results. It's a little more intimidating for me to not to ink before adding watercolors and I had to leave a bit of white space between some edges. I enjoyed the process, though it was not the loose style of painting that I'm used to these days.

Changing topics, my youngest is involved in a program called Better Together sponsored by NFTY (National Federation of Temple Youth). It teams 7th and 8th grade students with seniors living in a retirement community once a month for fun interactions. They meet once a month. The kids are organizing a bingo night for the seniors and we were asked to bring some goodies for prizes. So I made these bookmarks using homemade ink sprays. I used acrylic letter stamps for the words and tied a ribbon. I'm really happy with the way these turned out because I'm usually stamp-challenged. I'm just not very patient and usually smear the ink or misalign the stamp. But these turned out okay.

Now, my daughter and I are off to bake some cookies for the seniors. Hope you're having a wonderful Sunday!

Yummers! My favorite all time favorite candy is chocolate covered cherries. I've never had the fresh fruit dipped in chocolate though. I do like the kind covered in dark chocolate with a clear filling. I love the interaction between young ones and seniors. As a youth back in the dark ages, I always preferred the company of older ones. You can learn so much. Have a good week, Angelcake.